SENA Bursary Award Report

Dr Alexander M L Hayes

Imperial College London

Hydrocephalus World Congress, São Paulo, Brazil

31 July - 3 August 2026

I was extremely grateful to receive the SENA bursary, which allowed me to travel to São Paulo, Brazil, to attend and present at the Hydrocephalus World Congress in August 2026.

My oral platform presentation was titled 'Assessing cognitive change with cerebrospinal fluid removal in NPH using the NPH-Cognitron, a novel 12-test digital cognitive battery’. Currently, cognitive assessment in normal pressure hydrocephalus (NPH) uses a fragmented set of tools which often fail to detect impairment or improvement after CSF shunt surgery. Formal neuropsychological testing can show deficits and improvement but is costly and often inaccessible, so we aimed to develop an accessible digital tool to assess cognition in NPH.

We therefore deployed a digital battery of cognitive tasks in a prospective NPH cohort before and after tap-testing and shunting. We found that this battery is tolerated well in the population and is reproducible with no significant learning effect. Consistent with previous studies of cognition with tap-testing, we found no significant improvement in Cognition scores after tap-test, although gait responders did trend towards higher baseline scores. Preliminary post-shunt results do show a trend towards Cognitron improvement in the gait responders and decline in score in the non-responders. We will continue to deploy this battery as we complete the cohort, and hope in future to develop an even shorter digital battery which can detect improvement post-tap-test or shunting.

The conference as a whole was a fantastic experience to connect with global leading NPH researchers, including the architects of the landmark PENS2 trial (published in NEJM in 2025), and we had great hosts in Dr Fernando Gomes and the rest of the committee. Thank you to everyone at SENA for making this possible.

Alexander M L World Congress August 2026 Alexander M L World Congress August 2026